Laying Down the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  He didn’t wait for me to reply, instead pushing past me to head out the door.

  Jackson’s eyes met mine. “Always nice to start the workweek with an ass-chewing, isn’t it?”

  I offered her an empathetic chin lift. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Is it important? I’m swamped.”

  “It’s important.”

  “All right, then.” She waved me to follow her down the hall to her digs. The chief might not trust my judgment, but it was flattering to know Detective Jackson did.

  She slid into her rolling chair behind her desk, while I closed the door and took a seat in one of her wing chairs. “When I was patrolling on foot after the tornado Saturday, I ran into a gang looting the Bag-N-Bottle liquor store on Berry Street.”

  “You’re not the only one,” she said. “We had gangs hit a Radio Shack and a jewelry store, too. To be expected. Criminals see an opportunity, they’re going to take it.”

  Her tone was short, telling me to get to the point.

  “One of the men who l-looted the store looked like the police sketch of the man who’d been seen in Forest Park.”

  She leaned forward now, putting her hands on her desk. “This is getting interesting now.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “The guy was the only one who didn’t p-pull a gun on me. In fact, he defused the situation. He didn’t give off a violent vibe.”

  She raised a shoulder. “Just because someone doesn’t draw on a cop doesn’t mean he wouldn’t willingly kill a civilian, especially if he had a good reason to.”

  “True.” Still, the guy had shared beef jerky with Brigit. Even if the snack was stolen, it was still a sweet gesture, wasn’t it? “I noticed the guy had one of those wallets with the chain that attaches to his pants. Do you think the chain that was used in Samuelson’s attack in Forest Park could have been that type of chain?”

  She cocked her head. “I think it’s a distinct possibility.” She picked up her phone receiver. “Is the guy still in lockup or has he been released already?”

  “He was never arrested.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they weren’t cooperating and backup wasn’t able to get there in time to help me. I couldn’t take in four men by myself. I had no choice but to let them walk off.”

  She dropped her phone back into the cradle. Clunk.

  I pulled out my cell phone. “I got a photograph of them, though.” I pulled up the picture and showed it to her. The man in question was the shortest of the bunch. He walked to their left and slightly apart from the others.

  She heaved a sigh. “All it shows are the backs of their heads.”

  An angry flush warmed my cheeks. “Well, I couldn’t very well take a picture when they were facing me. For one, I had my gun in my hands. And for two, they might have shot me.”

  She raised a conciliatory palm. “I didn’t mean to rub you the wrong way, Officer Luz. I realize you did the best you could under the circumstances. All I’m saying is that the photo doesn’t help much.”

  I took a breath to calm myself and sat back in my chair.

  “Any idea who the guy might be?” the detective asked. “Or any of the men with him?”

  “The guy who looks like the murder suspect wore a white hoodie with a black tornado on it.” I went on to tell her that I’d spent an hour on the Internet last night, trying to track down the logo or mascot on the hoodie. “There’s a brand of vacuum named after the tornado, as well as a protein shake. The tornado is a mascot for a number of high schools and colleges from as far south as Key Largo, Florida, to Anoka, Minnesota, and even way out in Washington State.”

  Her lips pursed again. “So what you’re saying is that the hoodie, and our suspect, could be from anywhere.”

  My ire began to rise again but I tamped it down. The detective was only stating facts. No need to get my knickers in a twist.

  “Wouldn’t the odds be greater that he’d be from somewhere close?” I suggested. “Texline High School has a tornado for a mascot.” The small town was located in the panhandle, just south of the Oklahoma line on the Texas-New Mexico border. “So does Texas State Technical College.” The college had numerous campuses throughout the state. “Ball High in Galveston also has a tornado for a mascot.”

  “The Golden Tors,” Jackson said, nodding. “I drove past the school once on summer vacation. I remember thinking a hurricane would’ve made more sense than a tornado.”

  Galveston Island had suffered a massive hurricane in 1900 that killed over 6,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Beyond tragic. The seawall was put into place thereafter, to protect the island from future storm surges. More recently, Hurricane Ike, which struck Galveston in September of 2008, claimed over three dozen lives. Okay, maybe I could see why the high school wouldn’t want to have a hurricane as a mascot. Maybe it would have been better to avoid storm references all together—call themselves the Sharks or maybe something more original like the Jellyfish or the Sunburns.

  Jackson pulled a pen and legal pad from her desk drawer to take notes. “What else can you tell me about these looters?”

  “One was Asian with a spiky neck tattoo. Another was a black guy with lots of muscles and one of those swirly designs cut into his hair.” I circled a finger over my ear to indicate the location of the design. “The last guy looked to be Latino. He had pointed features and a thin mustache and beard.”

  Jackson tapped the point of her pen on the pad. “So we’ve got a guy of apparent mixed race, a black guy, an Asian, and a Latino. Sounds like the kind of diverse group they’d feature in a brochure for military recruitment. The only thing missing is the white boy.” She jotted down a few notes before looking up at me again. “You file an incident report?”

  “I filed one online Saturday night.” After spending a half hour curled up on my couch, crying. “But I didn’t put it together until just now that the guy in the hoodie resembled the man in the sketch.”

  “We need to get crime scene techs over to the Bag-N-Bottle ASAP.”

  “It’s unlikely they’ll find any fingerprints for the murder suspect,” I said. “He was wearing gloves. The others were, too.”

  Her brows rose. “That so? Maybe he’s already got a record and doesn’t want to get caught. And even if they wore gloves, it’s still possible he or one of his cohorts left a print before they put them on. If we can find one of them, maybe he’ll lead us to the guy we’re after.”

  She picked up her phone again and punched a button, relaying the information to someone in forensics and requesting they send a team to the Bag-N-Bottle immediately. When she hung up, she hit some keys on her computer keyboard, pulling up my report. She read through it and cut her eyes my way. “‘The fourth suspect exuded an aura of despair and melancholy that seemed to run as deep as his soul?’ What the hell kind of report is that?”

  I shrugged. “I’d just faced down death. I was feeling poetic.”

  She exhaled a long breath and waved for me to come around to her side of the desk. “Bring your chair and laptop with you. This may take a while.”

  I dragged the wing chair and my computer around her desk. Brigit followed me, flopping down at our feet to take a nap.

  Jackson gave Brigit a scratch behind the ears. “Hey, puppy.”

  Brigit responded with a swish-swish of her tail.

  The detective maneuvered her computer mouse and addressed me while gazing at her screen. “You familiar with Gangnet?”

  “A little.” I knew Gangnet was a database maintained by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Gang Prosecution Unit to share information on gang activity in the state, but I’d never had reason to access it before. I told the detective as much.

  “Well, you’ll learn it now,” she said. “I want you to help me look through the database and see if you spot any of the men from the Bag-N-Bottle. Of course the fact that the group was interracial is unusual and may make it harder to track them down.�
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  She went on to tell me that most gangs tended to form within a single race. Latinos made up Tango Blast, the state’s fastest-growing gang, as well as the Texas Syndicate, the Texas Mexican Mafia, the Latin Kings, and Barrio Azteca, a particularly dangerous gang with ties to drug cartels. The Aryan Brotherhood operated in the state, along with a support group who called themselves the Solid Wood Soldiers. Needless to say, whites made up these gangs. Whites also made up the majority of the membership in the Hells Angels and, despite the Spanish name, the Bandidos. The biker gangs often coordinated charity events to gain favor with the public and put a fresh patina on their tarnished images. Asian gangs included the Asian Boys and Asian Pride. The black gangs were more creative with their names. Hoova Crips. Bustin Heads Daily. Untamed Gorillaz. Playas Afta Cash. There was even a gang called the Fuck You Clique.

  How charming.

  Still, while gangs tended to separate along racial lines and used to engage in often violent rivalries, they’d recently learned they could sometimes profit by working together. Members of the Aryan Brotherhood had even set aside their racism—temporarily—to engage in crimes with members of other racial groups.

  “We’ve seen more of these gangs teaming up,” Jackson said. “It’s possible the four men you saw are members of different gangs and joined up solely to do some looting.”

  During the police academy, the instructors had informed us that gangs were such a problem in the big cities of Texas that the state had formed the Texas Anti-Gang (TAG) Tactical Operations Center in Houston. The team included representatives from the DEA, Homeland Security, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the ATF, Houston city police, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, U.S. Marshals, and the Harris County DA’s office.

  Gangs were ranked by the Department of Public Safety under a three-tiered “Threat Index” that took into consideration eleven factors including, among other things, the gang’s links to drug cartels, the type and frequency of crimes committed by the gang’s members, the level of violence, the prevalence of the gang throughout the state, whether juveniles were involved, the gang’s organizational effectiveness, the extent to which the gang was involved in human trafficking, and the threat posed to law enforcement. Gangs who posed a threat to law enforcement only if fleeing apprehension were considered a lower threat than those gangs who intentionally targeted members of law enforcement.

  Jackson showed me how to log in to the Gangnet database. “Run a search to see if you can find any gang members who attended any of those Texas schools you mentioned that have a tornado mascot.”

  It was a long shot, but it was the best shot we had.

  I moved my cursor to the search box and typed in Texline High School. There were no matches. I typed Ball High School next. One entry popped up, a listing for an African-American guy who’d graduated from Ball High in 2003. He’d gone on to an illustrious career moving marijuana in the nearby city of Houston. Though the man depicted in the mug shot was too old to be the person at the Bag-N-Bottle, it was possible the two might know each other, right? After all, they were potentially from the same hometown.

  I continued to read down his bio until I reached the field depicting his Last Known Address. Rather than a street name and number, the field contained the words Deceased 03/24/15. He’d been only thirty years old when he’d died. Sheesh. The report noted that he’d been shot in the back of the head and left in the brush next to a highway outside of Houston. His killer or killers had yet to be found.

  So much for that potential lead.

  Next, while Brigit snored and twitched at my feet, dreaming her doggie dreams, I searched for gang members who’d attended Texas State Technical College. There was only one, also an African-American, a young man of twenty who’d dropped out of the TSTC Welding Technology program in Waco and been sucked into gang activity up the road in Dallas. He’d been caught last year with four pounds of heroin, a sizable stash. Per the report, he was currently serving time in the Telford Unit in New Boston, which sat three hours to the northeast of Fort Worth.

  I looked over his picture.

  Darn. Not my guy, either.

  I mentioned him to Detective Jackson. “Think there’s any point in trying to contact him at the jail?” I asked. “See if maybe he knew the looter at TSTC?”

  She mulled it over a moment. “Not yet,” she said. “It takes forever to get an inmate on the phone. We’d have to jump through a bunch of hoops. Besides, we don’t even know for certain that the tornado you saw on the sweatshirt was the TSTC mascot. There are several TSTC campuses and multiple programs. The chances of that man on your screen knowing the looter are probably equal to the chances of winning the lottery.”

  True again. But somebody wins the lottery, right?

  I spent another two hours looking through the Gangnet files, trying a variety of searches that might unearth any of the four men. I searched by location, approximate age, and physical characteristics. The more photographs I looked at, though, the more muddled my memory seemed to become. Did the Asian guy have a shaved head, or was his hair spiky like his tattoo? Did the Latino have a silver cap on his front tooth or not? Did the black guy have pierced ears?

  Hell if I could remember.

  Although I found some gang members in the Fort Worth area who could possibly have been the men I’d encountered, I wasn’t sure about any of them. The only thing I was sure of at the moment was that, no matter what it took, somehow, someway I’d track these men down.

  THIRTY-TWO

  DOGGIE DREAMS

  Brigit

  Zzzzzzzzz …

  THIRTY-THREE

  SICK DAY

  Dub

  He woke with a start, surprised to find the apartment so light. He’d been unable to sleep and had stayed up late watching television and reading through his history book. He’d have the entire thing finished soon, for all the good it would do him.

  He rolled out of the recliner, walked to the kitchen, and glanced at the clock on the stove. 9:00 A.M. Uh-oh. His mother’s shift had started at eight.

  He stepped to her bedroom door. “Mom? It’s past nine. You’re late for work.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He tried again, knocking this time. RAP-RAP-RAP. “Mom? You up?”

  Still no answer.

  He tried the knob. The door was locked. Dammit. He couldn’t even get in the bathroom to take a piss. “Mom! Open the door!”

  Still nothing.

  He knocked full out now. Bam-bam-bam! “Mom!” He put his ear to the door.

  He heard no rustling.

  No snoring.

  No breathing.

  No signs of life whatsoever.

  Gulping back the thick lump that had formed in his throat, he ran to the kitchen, found a paper clip in the junk drawer, and pulled it straight as he rushed back to the bedroom door. He jammed the end of the metal strip into the hole on the doorknob, poking and poking and poking until he heard the click of the lock releasing. Tossing the clip aside, he threw the door open and ran to his mother, falling to his knees next to her mattress.

  Her face lay slack, her mouth hanging open just enough to allow a small puddle of drool to collect on the pillow beneath her head.

  His ears roaring in panic, Dub put a hand to her shoulder and shook her. “Mom? Mom, are you okay?”

  Guilt slammed him when he realized he would be nearly as relieved to find she had passed away as he would to find her alive. At least then he would no longer be sucked into this recurring nightmare. It would be over once and for all.

  Her right eye fluttered, then opened to a slit. “Why you carryin’ on like this?” she mumbled. “Someone dead?”

  He choked back a sob. “I thought you were.”

  Her eye slid shut again.

  He stood and kicked the side of her mattress. “Get up! You have to go to work.”

  “I’m not going,” she said. “I’m sick.”

  “You’re not sick!” He gave her mattress anothe
r kick. “You’re wasted.”

  She was using again. She’d lose this job, just like she’d lost so many others before. She’d lose the apartment, just like she’d lost so many before. She’d lose herself again, too.

  Same song, same verse.

  And he was sick of it.

  Trying to get her out of bed in this condition would do no good. He stood and gave her mattress a final kick. Sorry excuse for a mother.

  After using the bathroom, he found the phone number for the Taco Bell on the Internet and called the manager. “I’m calling for Katrina Mayhew. My mother won’t be able to come into work today,” he said. “Sorry, but she’s not feeling well.”

  “I didn’t realize Katrina had a son.”

  “That’s all right,” Dub said softly. “She doesn’t seem to realize it, either.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t explain. He just said, “Have a nice day” and hung up the phone.

  He ran a hand through his hair. Why was his mother like this? Why wasn’t she like those other mothers, who actually enjoyed caring for their children, who cooked and cleaned, who licked their fingers and styled their children’s hair with their saliva? He’d seen mothers do that. Lots of times.

  Okay, maybe the whole spit-style thing was gross, but he couldn’t remember his mother even once trying to fight his crazy cowlick with a brush or comb. And now she was missing work and would probably lose her job. It would be one thing if she were on her own, but she’d convinced Dub to stay with her. How could she not care at all?

  Screw it.

  Someone needed to go to work and earn a few bucks, and it clearly wasn’t going to be his mother. Not in the condition she was in.

  He grabbed his cell phone, hoping that maybe someone had left a message for him, wanting to hire him for an odd job. No such luck.

  He took a quick shower, dressed, and brushed his teeth. Bam! Dub slammed the door of the apartment as he headed out. His mother probably hadn’t even heard it, but it made him feel better anyway.

  He walked out to his van, trying to figure out what to do to earn some money. The only thing he could think to do was to go to the day labor site and see if someone might hire him.